This invention relates to a flat belt support system configured with an arrangement of a supporting roller, pulleys and a continuous flat belt such that flat belt may be driven by a driving roller and a belt path is created and controlled by articulating the support pulleys relative to the driving roller such that the flat belt will naturally tend to stay roughly centered on the pulleys while traveling about the belt path created. A variety of configurations using these components are common practice in many applications where the centerline of the belt path is essentially coplanar in a plane which is normal to the axis of the driving roller. However, this invention allows the pulleys to be articulated relative to the roller such that the centerline of the belt path is no longer coplanar. This invention allows objects conveyed by the flat belt to be selectively diverted from the plane normal to the axis of the driving roller. This invention also allows the belt path to move laterally along the axis of the driving roller.
This invention creates an advantage in applications in which it is desirable to have a single or plurality of flat belts being driven by a single driving roller while also needing to articulate each belt path independently to each other by adjusting both the relative spacing between the belts and the skew of the belts from the plane normal to the axis of the drive roller.
There are two very common industrial uses for flat belts as shown on FIG. 5. The first is the transmission of power from one driving rotary shaft to another driven rotary shaft via the use of pulleys and one or more flat belts. The second is for the purpose of conveyance in which one or more flat belts are driven with the intention of transporting another material or objects along the conveyance surface of the flat belting.
This invention is related to a need for conveyance of objects. It can be used in any industry where there is a need to convey objects in a flow direction with the added requirement of needing to laterally shift the conveyed objects relative to a straight flow direction and/or relative to the other objects being conveyed.
While it can be used in a variety of industrial applications, one common application is in the material handling of cardboard/corrugated sheets. In particular, during the production of corrugated flat boxes by a machine known as a Rotary Die Cutter, corrugated flat boxes are produced by converting a large rectangular feed sheet into multiple smaller flat boxes using a die cutting processes. The die boards are attached to a rotating drum and the material is fed through with the die board cutting the large rectangular sheet in both the material flow direction and perpendicular to the material flow direction to produce the multiple smaller flat boxes. These flat boxes qualify as objects which may be conveyed by the conveyance surface.
The term “UPS” is used throughout this patent in reference to the number of flat boxes produced due to cutting in the perpendicular to the material flow direction where as the term “OUTS” will be used in reference to the boxes produced due to cutting in the direction parallel to the material flow direction.
For many years there has been the need to collect these multiple UPS and OUTS of smaller flat boxes as they exit the Rotary Die Cutter and place the boxes into stacks of boxes for further processing downstream. There have been a multitude of stacking machines that have been produced to service this need. One form of sheet stacker is found in U.S. Pat. No. 2,901,250 granted to Martin on Aug. 25, 1959. A second form of sheet stacker is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,026,249 granted to TEI on Jun. 25, 1991.
One of the challenges of stacking the flat boxes is that during the process of making the stacks of boxes, it is often desired to separate the OUTS laterally as they are conveyed away from the Rotary Die Cutter. This lateral separation keeps the individual flat boxes from becoming interleaved with each other during transport and also allows for dividers to be placed between the individual stacks being produced to improve the integrity of the stacks of boxes. In FIG. 7B, a set of grooved belts referred to as Layboy Arms 53 are arranged in order to create the lateral separation. This need has also been addressed in the following patents: U.S. Pat. No. 3,860,232 granted to Martin on Jan. 14, 1975, U.S. Pat. No. 5,026,249 granted to TEI on Jun. 25, 1991, U.S. Pat. No. 6,000,531 granted to Martin on Dec. 14, 1999, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,427,097 granted to Martin on Jul. 30, 2002.
The usage of round, V-grooved and other grooved type belt conveying means affords the option of creating the laterally skewed belt path in a multiple number of ways since they each can be controlled by the position of the entrance and exit pulleys. These pulleys do not even have to stay in the same plane as the plane defined generally by the centerline of the belt path since the belts are forced to track each pulley with some method of grooving or rim on the pulleys. One form of this method in shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,860,232 granted to Martin on Jan. 14, 1975
Because of the total width of large industrial machinery including the sheet stackers, it is desirable to be able to skew larger width flat belts which rely on the tracking of their belts back surface as opposed to providing the large number of narrow grooved belts which would be required to support both large and small boxes across the entire width of the sheet stacker.
The prior art includes systems that allow the diversion of flat belts but do so by keeping the entrance velocity plane and exit velocity plane essentially coplanar or parallel, unlike the current invention which allows the exit velocity plane to be both non-coplanar and non-parallel.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,901,250 granted to Martin on Aug. 25, 1959, U.S. Pat. No. 3,860,232 granted to Martin on Jan. 14, 1975, U.S. Pat. No. 5,026,249 granted to TEI on Jun. 25, 1991, U.S. Pat. No. 6,000,531 granted to Martin on Dec. 14, 1999, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,427,097 granted to Martin on Jul. 30, 2002 are hereby incorporated by reference.